My thoughts on the movie Now You See Me
Spoilers inherent to discussion, I think. Click the cut at your own risk. :)
I saw this movie in the theatre and enjoyed it, but haven't gone back for multiple showings or tracked down a household copy. In many respects it's a Hollywood movie, and has some of the inherent problems of Hollywood's Issues.
That said, there's a couple of moments of fight choreography that were flat out glorious. I specifically remember a fight scene between Jack Wilder and Dylan Rhodes, and being really impressed with the use of space and angle of frame-shot for Wilder. They did a great job of showing Rhodes caught flat-footed by the way Wilder knew the space he was using and the way he fought, and it was believable that a bent-spoon con man could trap a trained FBI agent long enough to get away.
Some of the 'magic tricks' shots (the ones you get to see twice, first from the audience position then from the performer's position) kind of fell apart in the sheer stacked coincidences necessary to pull them off, but it's Hollywood. Stacked coincidences are their stock in trade. :)
I didn't actually class this movie as a fox or kitsune* movie when I saw it. I totally see where Larathia's coming from, don't get me wrong, especially in the motivations of characters like J. Daniel Atlas, Henley Reeves and Jack Wilder (the three younger members of the four-man obvious-magic-tricks crew, with Woody Harrelson's 'psychic'/hypnotist's motivation being very much getting back to a position of success he'd held in the past and then lost). They're trying to hop up several levels, from three or four tails to something like eight, and need something phenomenal and widely known to do it. Fair enough.
If it were just them, absolutely. Even the Robin Hooding of reclaiming lost money from the rich and returning it to the previous owners, absolutely. They're going to live in legend.
Throwing Rhodes' motivations into the mix completely reframes the story as I interact with it. It becomes a Count of Monte Cristo revenge arc framed in Robin Hood behaviour movie.
Fox fairytales are pretty immediate: thus-and-such wrongs so-and-so the fox, and thus so-and-so sets thus-and-such up for a fall, or now-and-then the fox marries lives-over-there the human and stays with him until she's exposed, then runs. Black-hat fox thinks humans killing each other over mud-gold is funny as hell, that sort of thing.
Taking 30 or 40 years to get oneself into a position to set up not only multiple successful men but several institutions for a 'pride goeth before the crash' affair, when you've successfully become a practicing magic worker in that period is . . problematic. It implies a certain lack of being able to let things go, and invites the question of how the magic-worker community polices itself (or even if it does, which is a terrifying concept).
I mean, I like Mark Ruffalo's work. He lends a great deal of gravitas to roles that would be completely unbelievable in others' hands.
I don't like Dylan Rhodes the FBI agent. Rocking the Count of Monte Cristo's approach to life involves long-term grudge holding, a huge amount of financial outlay for revenging yourself on those who have wronged you, and no remorse about using other humans as cogs in your machine.
To use fox metaphors, he's not the Nine-tail looking at the collection of threes-and-fours going 'okay, show me what you got' or 'hey, have you considered bringing the Eiffel Tower to life?'. He's the Nine setting them up to take a huge fall if they can't measure up to what he wants them to do, and he's not interested in telling them what he's actually up to. =|
He's certainly not the Nine looking at the threes-and-fours going '... are you actually trying to set me up for this?' or thinking '... this is going to be hilarious if I help. I'm definitely gonna help. :D'
I'd have to go back and re-watch the movie to do more complex critique on the plot and what I'd think about changing if I wanted it to be a fox movie, but there are a couple of ways they could have tweaked it to make a better magic practitioner movie, to my eye.
For instance I would have loved if Alma Dray the Interpol Agent was a practitioner of a very different flavour of magic, because it would not only have explained her significant interest in the case and in the foundational elements of the case, but given her power in a way the movie completely failed to provide.
I would have also been okay if the Reveal about who their test administrator was as part of a group of other practitioners, instead of just him apparently acting alone. The surprise of the 'yup, I played you guys, too' grin Ruffalo could have used there would have been awesome.
*: I'm moving away from 'kitsune' as a descriptor for my internal-worldbuilding magical trickster foxes. Korean kitsune are evil fuckers, and Japanese kitsune, while usually not wearing the very black hat of a Korean kitsune, do have more-or-less complex motivations and shapechanging rituals that don't work in the context of Wild Roses' foxes. Needing to stick your head in a human skull to change into a human shape, or wanting to marry a nobleman but not being able to hide your tail is a bit off.
Not entirely unrelatedly, Y. H. Lee's The Youngest Fox is a really fun short read playing on the more traditional mythological fox motif.
This entry also available at Dreamwidth and has
comments there.
I saw this movie in the theatre and enjoyed it, but haven't gone back for multiple showings or tracked down a household copy. In many respects it's a Hollywood movie, and has some of the inherent problems of Hollywood's Issues.
That said, there's a couple of moments of fight choreography that were flat out glorious. I specifically remember a fight scene between Jack Wilder and Dylan Rhodes, and being really impressed with the use of space and angle of frame-shot for Wilder. They did a great job of showing Rhodes caught flat-footed by the way Wilder knew the space he was using and the way he fought, and it was believable that a bent-spoon con man could trap a trained FBI agent long enough to get away.
Some of the 'magic tricks' shots (the ones you get to see twice, first from the audience position then from the performer's position) kind of fell apart in the sheer stacked coincidences necessary to pull them off, but it's Hollywood. Stacked coincidences are their stock in trade. :)
I didn't actually class this movie as a fox or kitsune* movie when I saw it. I totally see where Larathia's coming from, don't get me wrong, especially in the motivations of characters like J. Daniel Atlas, Henley Reeves and Jack Wilder (the three younger members of the four-man obvious-magic-tricks crew, with Woody Harrelson's 'psychic'/hypnotist's motivation being very much getting back to a position of success he'd held in the past and then lost). They're trying to hop up several levels, from three or four tails to something like eight, and need something phenomenal and widely known to do it. Fair enough.
If it were just them, absolutely. Even the Robin Hooding of reclaiming lost money from the rich and returning it to the previous owners, absolutely. They're going to live in legend.
Throwing Rhodes' motivations into the mix completely reframes the story as I interact with it. It becomes a Count of Monte Cristo revenge arc framed in Robin Hood behaviour movie.
Fox fairytales are pretty immediate: thus-and-such wrongs so-and-so the fox, and thus so-and-so sets thus-and-such up for a fall, or now-and-then the fox marries lives-over-there the human and stays with him until she's exposed, then runs. Black-hat fox thinks humans killing each other over mud-gold is funny as hell, that sort of thing.
Taking 30 or 40 years to get oneself into a position to set up not only multiple successful men but several institutions for a 'pride goeth before the crash' affair, when you've successfully become a practicing magic worker in that period is . . problematic. It implies a certain lack of being able to let things go, and invites the question of how the magic-worker community polices itself (or even if it does, which is a terrifying concept).
I mean, I like Mark Ruffalo's work. He lends a great deal of gravitas to roles that would be completely unbelievable in others' hands.
I don't like Dylan Rhodes the FBI agent. Rocking the Count of Monte Cristo's approach to life involves long-term grudge holding, a huge amount of financial outlay for revenging yourself on those who have wronged you, and no remorse about using other humans as cogs in your machine.
To use fox metaphors, he's not the Nine-tail looking at the collection of threes-and-fours going 'okay, show me what you got' or 'hey, have you considered bringing the Eiffel Tower to life?'. He's the Nine setting them up to take a huge fall if they can't measure up to what he wants them to do, and he's not interested in telling them what he's actually up to. =|
He's certainly not the Nine looking at the threes-and-fours going '... are you actually trying to set me up for this?' or thinking '... this is going to be hilarious if I help. I'm definitely gonna help. :D'
I'd have to go back and re-watch the movie to do more complex critique on the plot and what I'd think about changing if I wanted it to be a fox movie, but there are a couple of ways they could have tweaked it to make a better magic practitioner movie, to my eye.
For instance I would have loved if Alma Dray the Interpol Agent was a practitioner of a very different flavour of magic, because it would not only have explained her significant interest in the case and in the foundational elements of the case, but given her power in a way the movie completely failed to provide.
I would have also been okay if the Reveal about who their test administrator was as part of a group of other practitioners, instead of just him apparently acting alone. The surprise of the 'yup, I played you guys, too' grin Ruffalo could have used there would have been awesome.
*: I'm moving away from 'kitsune' as a descriptor for my internal-worldbuilding magical trickster foxes. Korean kitsune are evil fuckers, and Japanese kitsune, while usually not wearing the very black hat of a Korean kitsune, do have more-or-less complex motivations and shapechanging rituals that don't work in the context of Wild Roses' foxes. Needing to stick your head in a human skull to change into a human shape, or wanting to marry a nobleman but not being able to hide your tail is a bit off.
Not entirely unrelatedly, Y. H. Lee's The Youngest Fox is a really fun short read playing on the more traditional mythological fox motif.
This entry also available at Dreamwidth and has
comments there.